A New Definition of What It Means to Be Alive

In a previous post, I mentioned that we needed to re-examine death against the backdrop of what it means to be living.   I also mentioned that we need to re-learn the concept of life, and reinvent a definition of life that aligns with the truth of what it is, and not what we perceive it to be. 

This is much easier said than done, of course.  Our science even defines life as something that is tangible and calculable - it must be, or else it would be undetectable to us, wouldn't it?   But what if life - the very matter of life itself - has little or nothing to do with a chain of amino acids strung together to create our so-called building blocks?  What if, instead, life is about the inert, incalculable experience of the limitless, infinite conscious one mind that creates biology as a results of its process of becoming experience?

Put another way, we can view it through the lens of Godel's incompleteness - meaning we can say that life itself is an infinite folding of one experience upon another that leads to yet another and another, in an infinite number of possibilities, of which we only cognitively and individually experience minor moments in successive order.  This successive order is what we define as life, but instead, but really perhaps the greater 30,000 ft view is what would give us a better understanding of what it means to be alive. 

That's all well and good, of course.  But we're trying to find a way to re-think living in such a way that allows us to come to terms with the concept of biological death.   The only real way to do that, I believe, is to look at life as somethign that isn't lived - it just is. 

In order for this to make any difference at all in how we suffer with grief, it has to apply in the real world where we live. Otherwise its all smoke and mirros, and that last thing we need is more academics telling us what to think and how to feel.   So let's re-think the most basic axiom that we've all been taught since we came into this world:  that in order to be alive, we must have some type of biology.   

If we continue assuming that life is based on having individiualized biologies, we will continue to experience death as the cessation of that biology, and will continue to perceive that biological death is an ending.   

I believe, then, that the first step in reimagining death is to look beyond our current understanding of what it meanst to be alive. 

To be alive, then, we might say that there must be consciousness - in whatever form it may take.   

I'll write more a bit later on this, but for now, let's begin our transition of how we look at death by remembering that our definition of living might be incomplete.